Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness (29 page)

Place the beans, tahini, tamari, lemon juice, garlic, and cumin in a food processor or blender. Process until smooth. Add a small amount of water to keep the mixture moving if needed. Season to taste with black and cayenne pepper.

For each wrap, spread a thin layer of hummus on a tortilla and sprinkle some of the olives in a line down the center of the tortilla. Roll the tortilla into a tight wrap and cut into two or three pieces, depending upon the size of the tortillas.

Pack the rolls in a small plastic bag and refrigerate overnight so they are ready for the next morning’s long run. For a more substantial lunch, add lettuce, red bell pepper, and tomato before rolling the wraps. Hummus keeps refrigerated for 5 to 6 days or freezes well for several months.

MAKES
8–10
SERVINGS

19. Lost

DULUTH, MINNESOTA, 2008–10

There is a crack, a crack in everything.
That’s how the light gets in.

—LEONARD COHEN

I told my mother about my first victory in the Western States, how I had screamed “Minnesota!” when I crossed the finish line. I described the rain on Mount Si and the blistering heat of Death Valley. She hadn’t opened her eyes for three days.

I flew to Duluth’s Chris Jensen Nursing Home after a staff member called and told me my mom didn’t have much time. The first day, she tried to talk to me, but her disease had ravaged her vocal cords—nothing came from her lips but a faint whisper. When she looked at me I could feel her love, but I could also see her fear and her pain. The first day, I sat next to her and held her hand in mine. I told her that I loved her. The second day, she closed her eyes.

I told her that my brother and sister were there, and her sister, that we would always be there, that we loved her. To cool her fever, I put a cold, wet washcloth on her forehead. I moistened her mouth with a foam swab, adjusted the oxygen tubes feeding into her nose. Her skin was smooth, glowing. She had spent most of her life unable to do things most of us take for granted. She was fifty-eight years old. I stroked her hair, pulled back in a braid.

She always encouraged us to be grateful for the things we had—for life itself. She always expressed joy. Yet I knew she would be relieved to escape the pain.

I wondered—not for the first time—whether she would have been happier if I had stayed close to home, if I had taken care of her. I wondered how I would live without her. She gave me confidence and support, taught me about real strength and acceptance. And yet I, too, would feel relief at her deliverance from agony.

I had visited her twice a year. I took her to movies, especially those featuring Julia Roberts, and afterward Red Lobster, where I minced her favorite meal of shrimp scampi so she wouldn’t choke. Every time I left, she chided me for worrying, told me to enjoy myself, that she was fine, that she enjoyed watching her television and Julia Roberts movies, that as long as she had her remote control, she would be fine.

When it was time for me to leave, she would say good-bye and that she loved me. But her final parting was always the same. “I’m tough,” she said. “Don’t worry about me.” The words stayed with me as I climbed into my rental car and pulled away.

But for the past five years she couldn’t push the buttons anymore, was on a pureed diet, and her voice had grown more faint. With shame, I remembered waiting impatiently as she struggled with my father down the aisle of St. Rose Catholic Church to join me and my little brother and little sister in the front row. I remembered twenty-five years earlier, too, a vital, beautiful young woman who was starting to drop things. She was greeting a friend who had returned from a trip to France. I saw my mother tilt her head back with a lover’s ardor, waiting to be bathed in the miraculous healing water from Lourdes.

She had such faith. How could any god let this happen?

Sometimes you just do things.
But this time I didn’t know what to do. I hadn’t known for the past two years.

Leah and I had been in trouble all that time. She told me we married too young. She told me that I wasn’t funny, that I wasn’t interesting. She told me she was starting to have feelings for other men. I promised that we would work things out. That’s what you did when things got hard. You worked them out, you kept going. Especially when you married someone: That’s when you didn’t give up. Then she told me she was in love with another man, that she wanted a divorce. We separated in February 2008.

I had been with her almost my entire adult life. I called Rick Miller, sobbing, and he told me that everything happens for a reason. I spent weeks at a time in Ashland, Oregon, staying in the basement of my friends Ian Torrence and Hal Koerner. Hal and I raced each other for five or six years at the Western States, and Ian and I went all the way back to the Zane Grey 50-Miler, more than ten years earlier. Rumors started that I was washing dishes to pay the bills and logging hundreds of miles in the foothills of the Siskiyou Mountains. My Hardrock buddy Kyle Skaggs heard the rumors and the real story (the ultra community is small) and told me I should come to Flagstaff for a week and hang out with him and our friend Tony Krupicka, an up-and-coming young runner who in high school viewed me as one of his top three favorite runners. Kyle went further; as a joke he made a votive candle in my likeness and gave it to Jenn Shelton. He said it represented the patron saint of ultrarunners.

We camped outside Grand Canyon National Park that spring and ran along a plateau between the rim and floor of the Grand Canyon. Part of it was called the Tonto Trail, and I had never felt such stunning expansiveness and desolation.

It suited my mood. We camped for four nights. We ran 35 miles one day, then slightly shorter distances the other three days. I made tempeh tacos and fresh guacamole and spent nights huddled near the fire in my lightweight sleeping bag. The temperature dipped to 18 degrees. I told Tony that I didn’t believe love was eternal, that people make too big a deal of it. He told me I was wrong, that love was everything. Kyle was living out of his car and said he was headed to Silverton after our trip. He planned to run the Hardrock that year. He had all of his personal belongings in Rubbermaid bins. Some of our friends called him “the Rubbermaid Tramp.”

After one of our runs, drinking Tecates, and finishing up some beans and corn tortillas around a campfire, I realized that I envied not just Kyle’s freedom but the life that he and Tony lived. We had gotten slightly lost that day, had run 12 miles farther than we had intended, into and out of drainages, through hidden side canyons and back out. We were dehydrated and bonking all the way back on the 3,400-foot climb on the South Kaibab Trail to the South Rim.

When we finished, I could see in the two younger runners’ smiles the feeling I had fallen in love with more than a decade earlier. I started racing ultras when they were in grade school. Their joy reminded me how I used to feel, what I used to know.

We had trails and the fresh air and a little water and food and our fit bodies to move through and with the land. That was all we needed. Seeing Kyle and Tony so happy reminded me that that was all I ever needed, all any of us needed.

How had I drifted away from those simple joys? I wanted to regain the purity and gratitude that Kyle and Tony seemed to hold so effortlessly, so lightly. I wanted to run with the wide eyes of a novice again, with the passion and freedom of someone from whom nothing is expected.

I wanted to be a dirt bag. I wanted to camp out, to drive where I wanted. I wanted to not worry about Leah, to not worry about making a living as a physical therapist and coach while building a career as an ultrarunner. I had been working since I was a kid. I wished I had taken some time for myself. I wanted to keep running, to live in the moment, to explore my limits—but I wanted to do so with no obligations.

When I returned to Seattle, I spent a lot of time with one of my few single friends, Walter. I needed an escape. Even running long distances wasn’t bringing me the peace it had before. So Walter and I spent some time at the bars, playing pool, drinking a little more beer than I usually did, flirting with women. I needed to figure things out.

I volunteered at a race on Orcas Island. On the course, I noticed a hollowed-out tree, and I thought how wonderful it would feel to sit down inside and stay there forever. I felt hollowed out myself.

Running allowed me to define myself as an athlete. It had honed my discipline and strength and sped my path toward healthier, more joyous eating. Pursuing goals with single-mindedness had ultimately bestowed on me the greatest gift of all: the capacity to forget myself, to be absolutely present in the moment, and to appreciate the perfection of every moment. But now even the thought of running did nothing.

Walter suggested I see a shrink. The shrink suggested six months of psychotherapy. I told her to forget it.

Most of the people who knew me knew how I was feeling. Probably all of them knew. The one to speak it was Dave Terry, who had become not just my competitor but a good friend. Dave was more reflective than a lot of jocks I knew, a deep thinker. He worked as a musculoskeletal radiologist but always had time to talk. He could talk about anything, and he did so with a dry wit. His life seemed as balanced as anyone’s I knew. He rode his bike or ran 10 miles to work each way, loved a good meal and good company. He loved women, too, and there often seemed to be one around.

We sat at his kitchen table, each of us with a beer.

“Scott,” he said, “sometimes we have to go to dark places. Things will be better off and you’ll grow. You just don’t know it now.”

I kept running, a 50K here, a 50-miler there. I set personal bests at many early-season races, including the Way Too Cool 50K and, the very next weekend, the Chuckanut 50K. Then I went to Europe to attempt the race around the circumference of Mont Blanc but dropped out with a knee injury. I stayed in Europe, road tripped, ran, biked, and partied in the Dolomites of Italy, all with Dusty. Then I traveled to Greece and won my third Spartathlon (my fastest time ever). I was feted as a hero in Athens, Sparta, and all over Greece.

When I finally returned to the States after two months in Europe, I couldn’t sit still. I went to Vegas for my thirty-fifth birthday with Hal, Ian, and Jenn Shelton, with whom I became friends after the Copper Canyon, to run a 50K. We partied hard and I finished third. But if the dark place had grown brighter, I barely noticed. Running had always provided answers, solutions. Might it still?

In November I went to Texas to run a type of race I had never tried before. In the vast majority of ultras, distance and terrain provide fixed variables, and time reflects an individual’s success (or ignominious failure). In some ultras, though, the measures are reversed. In those races, time is the fixed variable. Runners run around—and around and around—a course often smaller than a mile for 24 hours. Whoever runs farthest wins.

Even the toughest and swiftest ultrarunner finds that the 24-hour contest’s monotony provides mental and emotional challenges that can be insurmountable.

In terms of physical demands, muscular stress, and caloric expenditures, a 24-hour race is much like any other ultramarathon. Except there are no mountain passes and wildflowers to imbue the event with beauty, no horizon or distant peak by which to measure your progress, no one ahead or behind you to race against, no lonely dawns or solitary twilights in which you can wrap your thoughts. Most noticeably there is no finish line, just a moment in time to mark the end.

Not all that long ago, weekend joggers would wonder aloud why anyone in the world would ever run a marathon. Many marathoners still raise their eyebrows at the notion of running farther than 26.2 miles. And even among ultramarathoners, there are those who don’t see the point of the 24-hour event. I never saw the point myself until I read
Ultramarathon
by James Shapiro in 1999.

Though extreme long-distance running contests have surely been staged longer than anyone has been writing about them, records of 24-hour races extend as far back as 1806, when two English athletes named Abraham Wood and Robert Barclay Allardice faced off on the Newmarket to London Turnpike for a wager of 600 guineas. Enormous crowds, wet weather, and allegations of cheating marred the event, but a new sport was born in the modern era.

The concept of the 24-hour race stretches back much farther, to a time when humans measured their endurance against the cycle of the sun. The ancient Greek historians wrote of day runners who could cover long stretches between one dawn and the next. According to Peter Nabokov’s
Indian Running,
Native American ceremonial running was also measured against the sun, “the runners through their exertion strengthening its movement across the sky.”

In the 1870s, the 24-hour event branched off into the six-day race, in which competitors would travel as far as they could on foot in that time. The six-day footrace stopped drawing fans, and for the most part stopped altogether, in the 1890s. It’s experienced something of a rebirth the last thirty years.

The 24-hour race, though, never went away. In 1953, the great Arthur Newton, the father of Long Slow Distance training, persuaded the British amateur Road Runners Club to stage a 24-hour event. For almost the next thirty years, 24-hour events were staged in Italy, South Africa, New Zealand, and even the United States. The first truly international competition was held at Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1981.